Nestled just outside Quebec City, the majestic Montmorency Falls reaches heights of some 275 feet – a full 100 feet taller than the Niagara Falls. During the long Canadian winters, cliffs beside the main waterfall freeze over entirely, giving the appearance of cascading water stuck in time. In this short documentary from 1978, two daring climbers (plus a daring film crew) scale the Pilier de Crystal – a massive sheet of ice sitting beside the main waterfall. The result is a thrilling – and extraordinarily chilling – portrait of human skill, athleticism and drive amid an arresting and imposing landscape.By Aeon VideoWatch at Aeon

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Chinese New Year (also known as Lunar New Year), which starts on the new moon that...

Chinese New Year (also known as Lunar New Year), which starts on the new moon that falls between 21 January and 20 February, is celebrated by some 1.5 billion people around the world. And, as travel has become more affordable to China’s rapidly growing middle class, the holiday now accounts for an estimated 3 billion trips (called chunyun in Chinese), making the celebration the world’s largest annual human migration. The New York-based filmmaker Jonathan Bregel uses scenes of this extraordinary human flow to convey both the sheer magnitude of the movement of people and the moments of celebration that are a crucial aspect of the holiday. By Aeon VideoWatch at Aeon

Loving a pet is usually accompanied by a sombre and unavoidable truth: unless you’ve bought a...

Loving a pet is usually accompanied by a sombre and unavoidable truth: unless you’ve bought a puppy to accompany you through your final days or are providing excellent care to your tortoise, your dear animal companion will likely precede you in death. However, if you’re a dog owner who happens to have $100,000 to spare, the wonders of modern medical technology do offer a potential loophole. Co-starring the Canadian filmmaker Sophy Romvari, her beloved 16-year-old Shih Tzu Norman and the US singer and dog-cloning proponent Barbra Streisand, Norman, Norman follows Romvari as she falls into a YouTube hole on the promises, perils and prohibitive cost of pet cloning. Bittersweet and inflected with understated humour, this offbeat short debuted at the Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF) in 2018.By Aeon VideoWatch at Aeon

‘It’s not so much being seduced by a story. It’s the thrill of seeing in itself.’During...

‘It’s not so much being seduced by a story. It’s the thrill of seeing in itself.’During the first film screenings in the 1890s, viewers marvelled at moving images that had an unprecedented power to transport them to faraway places in an instant. At first, these shorts – which included glimpses of everything from Niagara Falls to elephants in India – had no narrative structure. Audiences flocked to theatres simply for the novel experience of seeing people and places, some familiar and others deeply strange, rendered lifelike and immediate before their eyes. And, as the film curator Dave Kehr explains in this video from New York City’s Museum of Modern Art (MoMA), the images were hardly the grainy and frantically paced footage that has become synonymous with ‘old film’ today. Rather, viewed in their original form on large screens and prior to decades of degradation, these movies were vivid and realistic. In particular, early 68mm film, which was less practical than 35mm film and thus used less frequently, delivered startlingly lifelike impressions of distant realities to early moviegoers.Via KottkeBy Aeon VideoWatch at Aeon

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